Editors Note

By Richard "Zippy" Grigonis
The principal article in this month's issue concerns the increasingly subtle and complex relationship developing among Unified Communications (UC), Fixed-Mobile Convergence (News - Alert) (FMC) and of course our beloved IMS.

IMS enables new services to be hatched quickly for deployment on both wireless and wireline networks, and it's beginning to look like many of these services will have a strong UC "flavor" to them, if only because of the current mania over anything UC in nature. In case you haven't noticed, TV commercials by Cisco (News - Alert) and Nortel have extolled the wonders of UC, with Nortel relating how their hyperconnected enterprise concept and UC strategy "breaks down the barriers between voice, email, conferencing, video and instant messaging". Nortel (News - Alert) is in an alliance with Microsoft and Nortel's CS 1000 is the world's first IP-PBX tested to work seamlessly with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS 2007 was Microsoft's (News - Alert) big UC announcement, made in October 2007).

Aspect Software is bringing UC to the contact center, since they've discovered that first-call resolution is important to maintain customer satisfaction, and 10 percent of customer calls to contact centers involve locating experts outside of the contact center. Aspect's (News - Alert) technology utilizes SIP-powered skills-based presence to determine which workers have the appropriate skills to assist an agent in a customer call, and then figure out via presence which of these people with the proper skills-set are available for a consultation. By mid-2008, Aspect will have integrated its UC solutions with Microsoft OCS and IBM (News - Alert) Sametime, enabling enterprises to fully integrate contact centers into existing business processes as part of an overall corporate UC strategy.

Avaya (News - Alert) is also in the act, delivering inexpensive ($99 per user) UC to workers in such vertical markets as branch office/retail and banking branches. Avaya has also developed a system that presents "intelligent presence" to its customers. Avaya's Intelligent Presence Server aggregates information from Microsoft, IBM, and other applications using standard protocols like SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP. It knows that a user's presence information is generally derived from several sources, so instead of displaying each type of presence from each service/application, the user's presence is comprehensively displayed just once. Avaya is working with some mobile operators to enhance the accessible presence status information of users.

Meanwhile, IBM is planning on spending a billion dollars over the next three years, all for UC product development. They're taking an open systems, multi-platform approach, and they'll be upgrading their collaboration software, including Sametime, at the same bolstering and deploying mobile clients and growing a large partner ecosystem.

All of this should signal to service providers working in the IMS realm that opportunities exist in developing UC/FMC services that may of necessity communicate and/or integrate with customer premise-based systems. The strict delineation between hosted services, managed services and customer presence equipment (CPE) solutions will undoubtedly continue to blur, as any "gaps" in information or functionality by CPE solutions will be filled in by outside services, and vice versa. For such a flexible solution to materialize, both IMS and vendor solutions will need to be imbued with more "glue" in the form of Web 2.0 and Software Oriented Architectures (SOAs). The final form taken by IMS shall be somewhat different than the nice, neat, top-down schematic formulated years ago.

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